The Brown Coal Bard's Embassy

Brigitta was the name of a lignite mine in Lusatia. In 1877 it was opened up as an open-cast mine near the village of Schwarze Pumpe near Brigittenhof. Initially it was called Hope III. But as miners are, they preferred to address their pit as a difficult lover to whom they were fatally infatuated until she died in 1991 — and beyond.

After the opening of the Berlin Wall and the Deutsche Mark, the world market and the Treuhandanstalt had dealt with them, the singer-songwriter Gerhard Gundermann sang his requiem: "Oh, my pit Brigitta is broke / And the last shift was already sold / And my excavator dies in the Heide / And the earthquake will finally stop.” The singing excavator driver knew what lignite meant for the region. Work, identity and home, eating land, dying villages, dirt and early death. "The lungs are like a sack full of lumps of coal / Ash in the heart, alcohol in the veins." Gundermann himself died seven years later. Gundi, that's all there is on his gravestone in the forest cemetery in Hoyerswerda, was 43 years old.

In the Rhenish mining area for lignite, the largest in Europe, deep in western Germany, the energy crisis is currently causing the Garzweiler II opencast mine to be expanded and the Lützerath settlement to be sacrificed. Greens occupy the abandoned houses, while other Greens, such as the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs, promote the excavators and celebrate the early phase-out of lignite from 2038 to 2030 as a climate protection measure.

The people of Lusatia in villages like Schleifen and Klein Trebendorf are in the same situation as in Lützerath near Erkelenz. They too are threatened with resettlement if the Nochten opencast mine takes away their land and houses. It is the pit where "Gundermann", the movie, was filmed. It was released in cinemas in 2018, long after Brigitta had been flooded and transformed into a blooming lake landscape.

Due to the success in the cinema, Gundermann was transformed from an Eastern singer into a singer and "Brigitta" became a modern classic of German songs. Alexander Scheer presents him as Gundermann in Nochten opencast mine to the last miners, whose helmets are dripping with rainwater and mingling with their tears: "I became a miner like my father and drove in / But my son will no longer be a miner here / The Tracks are rusting and the conveyor belt is empty / Nobody wants the brown coal from here anymore.”

Back then, in 1991, nobody wanted the coal anymore, because with the GDR there was no longer any need: the GDR had exported the better fossil fuels from the Soviet Union further west to remedy the notorious lack of foreign exchange, and also the last lignite burned. For the power plants, the coal ovens and the gray fog that used to lie over the entire east of Germany on bad days.

"It's just as much a part of it as the dust on the window sill," sings Gundermann with his band, the rope team, in "Brigitta", his hymn to lignite.